Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

122 WENDY A.SMITH
always stayed back late at work and was seen to be busy on the job. But Cheng
had no established personal links with workers outside of the factory context, and
thus exercised limited influence. He conformed more to the Chinese community’s
mode of behaviour which preserves class and status differences.
Sanusi’s successful attempt to be represented on the board of directors reflected
a concern that the company’s long-term interests were not adequately represented
by the large proportion of Japanese from the parent company, who were resident
in Japan, or by the transient expatriate Japanese managers in Malaysia, whose
personal career interests were primarily with the parent company.
But Sanusi’s quest for a director’s position also concerned his personal ambition
to receive a measure of recognition and status among the local managers within
the company. As the only senior Malay manager, recruited before the bumiputera
policy, he was always marginalised. Although it was the common practice to have
Malays in the position of personnel manager, Malays who achieved positions of
prominence in business or academia before the affirmative action advantages
under the NEP did so in the face of considerable handicaps.
Approaching retirement age, Sanusi could expect to be rehired on a contract
basis for several years and perhaps located in a subsidiary company. Afterwards his
son’s company would provide a source of income. Sanusi’s successful career and
entry into the new rich was founded on a combination of the NEP bumiputera
policy and aspects of the Japanese management system promoting lifetime
employment and the principle of seniority. Recruited from university, but with an
incomplete science degree, his career in the Japanese company had generally
served him well, while not making him extremely wealthy. It provided him and his
family with security and a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. In the Japanese
management system of the time, there was no likelihood that talented juniors
would leapfrog over him. Though Sanusi displayed managerial skills based on
village-style patron-client ties, he also showed a degree of ‘Japanese-style’ loyalty to
the company; as a bumiputera manager, he could have moved to another foreign
company quite easily, but did not.
Rahman: NEP graduate to manager
The first new top-management candidate to be recruited after the old guard was an
NEP Malay science graduate, Rahman. He was appointed section chief in the
technical department in 1976, several years after the position had been left vacant.
Rahman was being groomed for a manager’s post after the Japanese were to
leave in 1980, before the Look East Policy reversed the ‘nationalisation of top
management’ policy of the first decade of the NEP.
Rahman resigned to take up a university tutorship after one year with the
company but, for a number of reasons, returned to Iroha (M). He was persuaded
by his relatives not to leave a job with such good promotion prospects in the
private sector. They were concerned about his ongoing ability to contribute to them
financially. The Japanese took Rahman back because it would be costly for them